---
title: 'Innocence Concerns Spur Calls for Higher Standard in Death Penalty Cases'
description: 'Attorneys from the New York Capital Defender Office have followed the lead of various death penalty experts and petitioned the New York Court of Appeals…'
canonical: 'https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-concerns-spur-calls-for-higher-standard-in-death-penalty-cases'
section: news
date: '2004-01-12T22:25:50-05:00'
updated: '2025-03-14T14:23:27-04:00'
source: 'Death Penalty Information Center'
---

Attorneys from the New York Capital Defender Office have followed the lead of various death penalty experts and petitioned the New York Court of Appeals to require a higher standard of proof of guilt before a death sentence may be sought. The current standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" of guilt applies in both capital and non-capital cases. Because of the evidence of mistakes in death penalty cases, the attorneys called for proof "beyond any doubt" in such cases. Frank Keating, a senior Justice Department official in the Reagan administration who tried to raise the level of certainty to secure a capital conviction during his recent tenure as Governor of Oklahoma, noted, "I am certainly no shrinking civil libertarian, but I think if you're going to take somebody else's life, you need to be convinced to a moral certainty." Professor James Liebman of Columbia Law School, who has extensively studied the error rate in capital cases, stated that the movement toward a higher standard of proof is a logical outgrowth of the effort to make the death penalty more reliable. (New York Times, January 11, 2004) See [Innocence](/article.php?did=412&scid=6).